Category: Book Review

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What the Greeks teach us about suicide

— The great tragedians’ writings on suffering, stigma and survival can help guide our own struggles with assisted dying.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Suicide of Lucretia, painting, circa 1525

By Rowan Williams

A leading broadsheet marked Good Friday this year with an article about the need to overcome the “taboo” surrounding physician-assisted dying. It seemed a rather odd way not only of celebrating the day, but of referring to a topic that has had its fair share of uninhibited public discussion in the past two to three decades; but the writer was, I suppose, trying to distance the issue from the stigma that still hangs around the word “suicide”. Edith Hall, in this remarkable, brave and compassionate book, evidently shares something of this concern, seeking to disentangle the idea of “euthanasia for someone facing an inevitable and agonising death” and “temporary and intermittent urges” to end one’s life. The great moral weight of the book’s argument is the conviction that suicide as we normally think about it is an act that inflicts drastic damage on survivors. Anyone contemplating deliberately ending their life needs to be alert to that damage – a damage that can have transgenerational consequences impossible to quantify.

Transgenerational trauma is at the heart of the book. Hall presents us with a tragic family history, both her great-grandfather and her grandmother having taken their own lives, leaving her mother with a crushing burden of guilt and bewilderment, expressed in years of emotional repression or confusion and self-harming habits. As Hall writes, no one was paying much attention in the mid-20th century to the needs of suicide’s “survivors” – children, siblings, friends, carers. People were largely left to work out their own strategies, and these strategies, often involving some level of denial, had their own lethal effects: Hall’s last but one chapter, “The Author’s Tale”, describes her own harrowing struggle over many years with suicidal depression, and the crucial role that consideration of the violence her suicide might inflict played for her.

This is where her classical studies prove significant. Hall is one of the most prolific and insightful commentators in English on Greek tragedy, and in Facing Down the Furies she draws out an aspect of this literature that not many have highlighted. In her view, what is strikingly distinct in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides when they deal with suicide (and with other forms of untimely and violent death) is their readiness to imagine the reactions of survivors – parents, spouses, children, whole households – so that the unnaturalness of the act is not blunted or romanticised. “You’ve destroyed more than just yourself,” says Theseus, lamenting his dead wife Phaedra in Euripides’s Hippolytus. And, with perhaps even more poignancy, the same author’s Suppliant Women depicts a father resolving on suicide after his daughter has killed herself.

In a way, this unsparing recognition of suffering is the other side of what is laid out so poignantly in a very different drama, the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where extreme physical anguish is compounded by the lack of any observer: “He [Philoctetes] desperately needs to have his suffering acknowledged,” as Hall writes. Part of the function of tragic writing is the securing of witness: the telling or showing of suffering does not ease pain but at least breaks down the terrible isolation of the sufferer. Perhaps – so tragic literature suggests – the fact of witness preserves the glimmer of hope that unmitigatedly terrible experience can be “meaningful”, at least to the extent that it is accompanied by compassionate acknowledgement.

So for Hall, the tragedians were her “witnesses”; they offered words and images to let her know that the crushing inheritance of family catastrophe and the blinding loneliness of suicidal depression had been seen, thought, spoken. Her book is written to pass on that perception and to tell us, when we face the pressure of unrelieved unhappiness or meaninglessness, that our lives are always bound with those of others, and so are not simply a property for us as individuals to dispose of.

Digesting all this, we may come to understand more clearly the reactions that help to perpetuate the stigma surrounding the issue. There is sheer anger: how could they do this to me, to us? There is condemnation, religious or otherwise: this is a sinful rejection of the gift of life. There is passivity, collusive passivity: it’s their decision, it’s a matter of freedom. The anger has to be dealt with by the sort of patient narration that Hall undertakes so sensitively in her extended memoirs of her family (providing, incidentally, a vivid snapshot of Scottish civic and cultural life from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century). Condemnation abandons this patient quarrying for understanding and will get us nowhere. Collusive passivity simply fails to register the depth of destructive impact; at worst it spills over into the cheapened existentialist dramatising of suicide as the ultimate expression of sovereign autonomy (Dostoevsky has some things to say about that).

There is a textbook oversimplification that associates ancient Stoicism with a view resembling this, and it has found avatars in more modern discussions. Hall reminds us that in its most familiar form (in Pliny, or Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, say) it is bound up with a distinctive culture of “noble” liberty, independence, honour and reputation, which is not quite what the earlier and more pragmatic Stoics actually suggest. She also notes that in later writers (David Hume is a good example) it is typically favoured by wealthy, male, single thinkers, people who are not that interested in the effects of their actions on others because they do not live in a particularly interdependent framework of relations.

She notes that religious attitudes to suicide have played a large part in establishing the stigma around it. Biblical prohibitions against the taking of human life were read as implicitly forbidding taking one’s own. Just as the killing of a family member is in some sense a worse offence than killing a professed enemy, so suicide deserves special opprobrium because it is the violent ending of the life that is closest to you – your own.

Hall does not go into the full detail of St Augustine’s treatment of the question in his City of God, but it has some resonance with her summary of the Roman cult of “noble” suicide. Augustine is discussing the fact that some women (especially nuns) raped during the Sack of Rome in 410 took their own lives, and he compares it with the well-known Roman legend of the suicide of Lucretia after being raped by Tarquin. He gives very short shrift to the idea of suicide for the sake of honour, and says firmly that the victim of sexual violence is not to think of herself as guilty, nor is anyone else to treat them as culpable. Lucretia is for him an example of what he analyses at length in City of God, the Roman obsession with status and reputation at the expense of internal moral clarity. He recognises the depth of shame that is felt by survivors of rape, but warns against assimilating it to guilt. By contemporary standards, he pays no real attention to the abiding trauma of physical violation, the burden of self-disgust and so on; his treatment of the question is one that does not give much space to the subject’s point of view. But he does at least counter the idea that internalising the blame that a patriarchal society projects is a good thing.

Hall, I suspect, is not a great aficionado of Augustine, but there is some common ground here. Dealing with suicidal thought or temptation involves restoring a sense of being positively involved with the lives of others – the feeling that people are “invested” in your life, and that killing yourself is an injury to them. But for that to happen, the culture you live in also needs to demonstrate that investment. For the survivor of rape or any other form of abuse, for the demonised sexual minority, for those left behind in
the bloodthirsty competitiveness of some academic hothouses or online networks, what makes a difference is not only an individually positive attitude but the assurance of – once again – being witnessed, being taken seriously, being treated as though your well-being were intrinsic to that of others. Policies around – for example – student mental health (something that Hall, a professor at Durham University, and this reviewer both have some experience with) are not only about survival tactics for individuals but about creating cultures that challenge shaming and affirm what I’ve called investment. And this book is triumphant proof that teaching and writing about the humanities is a vitally necessary dimension of such culture creation. Anyone who has ears to hear, let them hear.

Hall writes with lucidity and directness, and her treatment of the classical texts is consistently insightful. There are one or two forgivable bumps in the road here and there. The reference to an intriguing apocryphal story of St Peter confronted by a suicidal woman is a bit garbled in the notes, assimilating two ancient works attributed to the same author that happen to be printed together in the same volume. Also, the citation of two texts from Hebrew Scripture as a “Jewish proscription of suicide” is rather misleading: one of these texts is an instance of the general prohibition against murder which the rabbinical commentators took as including the prohibition of suicide; the other bears no obvious relation to the topic and may be a faulty transcription. Jewish scholars have generally allowed that there is no direct condemnation of suicide in the Torah, and certain dramatic acts of individual and collective suicide when faced with persecution or massacre (from the death of King Saul or the mass suicide of the defenders of Masada against the Romans) have been regarded by the commentators as pardonable, even sometimes as admirable. We might see here an implied argument (whether we accept it or not) that in a way complements Hall’s main concern: in these instances, a survivor of mass violence would be left exposed to the worst fate imaginable, so that collective suicide could appear a more merciful and moral possibility.

But that is not Hall’s main focus. What we have is a moving reflection on how the sense of anchorage in the lives and needs of others is central to keeping us alive, especially when not much else appears to be doing so. In one way, the phrase quoted above about “intermittent and temporary urges” does less than justice to the intensity of suicidal ideation grounded in traumatic loss, obsessive guilt, or extreme and unbroken depression. Some would say that it is more like the steady presence of a death sentence, with only the timing being uncertain: not a matter of unbearable physical agony but a mental hopelessness that makes a liveable future just as unimaginable. Indeed, the case for physician-assisted dying often appeals to just that sense of an unimaginable future, whether or not accompanied by excruciating physical pain. This is not a book about temporary bouts of darkness, but about the long and winding road of internal terror or emptiness that leads to the final decision for death; about the deep roots in family history as well as individual suffering that push in that direction.

Which is why I hope we hear more from Edith Hall about how her reflections bear on the question of “assisted” suicide – reservations about which are not all rooted in some variety of irrational dogmatism (religious believers in fact disagree on this as on a good many other ethical questions). As the pressure for legal change mounts – a petition led by Esther Rantzen recently triggered a debate in parliament – there is also a heightened awareness that how and by whom decisions are to be made if there is new legal provision are not straightforward, precisely because of the complex mutual “investments” involved where a dying person and their families and friends are concerned. There are reassuring and not-so-reassuring stories; there is a nagging uncertainty in some minds about how a new policy would work in terms of resourcing for palliative care, the use of funds, the pressures on an overloaded healthcare system and so on.

Hall is right to want to resist assimilating all forms of “willed” death to the desperate, isolated, heartbreaking and hurtful instances at the centre of her narrative. But as we go on grappling with these questions we need not the breaking of an imaginary taboo, perhaps not even just the disappearance of a tradition of stigma, but more of the granular, sensitive, honest recording that this book offers, and more of the deep resource of the imagination represented by the great tragedians she so eloquently brings alive for us.

Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me
Edith Hall
Yale, 256pp, £18.99

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A Novel of Survival and the Sublime in the Mojave Desert

— Melissa Broder’s “Death Valley” follows a grieving narrator through her reconnection to the earth.

By Claire Vaye Watkins

In Thomas Merton’s 1960 translation of the teachings of the fourth-century Christian monks known as the Desert Fathers, “Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence … now what more should I do? The elder rose in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like 10 lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?”

In her 2021 novel “Harrow,” the 21st-century monk Joy Williams wrote: “I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.”

Melissa Broder’s incandescent new novel, “Death Valley,” is, like her desert forebears, ecstatically awake to the world’s astonishments. When the unnamed heroine arrives from Los Angeles to the edge of alleged nothingness in the Mojave Desert, she feels “empty”: Having lately faced her father’s “five-second death,” and then his resurrection, and then his subsequent fall into unconsciousness, she is both rebelling against impermanence (a.k.a. writing a novel) and hurtling toward it.

A spiritual seeker, sober except for her self-diagnosed internet addiction, the narrator tries to make a zendo of Reddit, with surprisingly mixed results. “If I’m honest,” she says, “I came to escape a feeling — an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, as the last pink light creeps out into infinity, that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me.”

The cover of “Death Valley” shows a tear-shaped cactus beneath a highly detailed, pencil-drawn eye. The title and author name are in hot pink type.

Immediately the Mojave starts working its miracles on this sad, horny woman who feels afraid of the sky, judged by the moon and “cosmically needy.” She soon observes that, “wandering around in the desert, there’s no need to play hard to get with God.” When she shines her love light on two perfectly drawn employees of a Best Western, they in turn point her to a mysterious hiking trail. Buddhists tell the parable of the second arrow of suffering, “the feeling about the feeling,” as the Silver Jews put it. In prose of unparalleled style and seemingly effortless bravery, Broder’s narrator shoots an entire quiver of emotional arrows into herself and then, like Frida Kahlo’s little deer, bounds into the wilderness, heart open, wounds weeping, no hat, not enough water.

Despite fearing herself and her novel “too earthbound,” she digs in, getting as earthy as Mary Austin or Ana Mendieta by climbing into a magical Saguaro cactus. Here Broder’s riotously original ecosexual surrealism performs an uncanny transubstantiation, the novel becoming a survival adventure that couldn’t have been better written by Jack London himself. Broder’s euphoric plotting and winning characters combine with a gift for desert description (that pink light creeping out into infinity) reminiscent of Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” I tried to ration this book but guzzled.

If I have a gripe, it’s that Joshua trees don’t have “leaves,” a word Broder uses twice. Spikes, spears, daggers, tines, needles — but, by my code, never leaves. Maybe that’s trifling, maybe not. If we can learn, as Broder all but implores, to worship a land that would impale the sentimental, leaf-stroking impulse of the pastoral, then maybe we can love the whole world as it deserves to be loved. Given that the protagonist meets God in the Mojave, what to make of the fact that many of the places that awaken us to the world’s astonishments are slated for sacrifice?

Much of Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve are, as of this writing, inaccessible after flooding from Tropical Storm Hilary. In 2020 a fire burned over 43,000 acres of Cima Dome, one of the largest Joshua tree forests in the world. This summer, another fire more than doubled that carnage. Meanwhile “green” capitalists are exploiting the climate emergency by grabbing unbroken, formerly public, pilgrimage-worthy expanses of the Mojave and the Great Basin for water-intensive mines, geothermal plants at biodiverse springs and poorly sited industrial solar arrays on critical tortoise habitats.

“Death Valley” is a triumph, a ribald prayer for sensuality and grace in the face of profound loss, a hilarious revolt against the aggressive godlessness, dehumanization and fear plaguing our time. All 10 of Melissa Broder’s finger lamps are blazing. Why not be totally changed into fire?

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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‘How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation’

“How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Consolation” gives insight into how to properly grieve and how to think about death, tragedy, and other misfortunes. (Princeton University Press)

By Dustin Bass

When it comes to grieving, consolation is often best received from someone who has dealt with grief before. They bring experience (unfortunately, it takes misfortune to receive such experience) and provide wisdom in how to deal with heartache and tragedy.

In one of the recent editions from Princeton University Press’s ongoing series, “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers,” the ancient wisdom comes from the great Roman statesman and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero. In “How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation,” readers are shown insight into how to properly grieve and how to think about death, tragedy, and other misfortunes.

To begin, Michael Fontaine, the translator of the classic work “Consolation,” discusses how the original was primarily written in response to the untimely death of Cicero’s daughter, Tullia. More importantly, in the introduction, he discusses how the work he has translated is actually not Cicero’s at all, but was rather built upon the idea of Cicero’s lost work, which was lost around the fourth century.

This translation is based off of the work that arose suddenly in 1583 and had its authenticity debated for centuries. Although it was eventually concluded that it was not authentic, this doesn’t mean that the spirit of Cicero is not part of the work; indeed, it is.

As Fontaine states, “Not all fakes are fakes in the same way. This fake [“Consolation”] is not a fabrication, but a recreation.” The work utilized the remaining fragments from the original and the entire work has a style that is “highly Ciceronian.” For all intents and purposes, this is Cicero at work, as it was so expertly researched and written.

The Message

The message from Cicero is that death is a gift. In fact, he claims it to be the greatest gift. He admits how difficult it was to attain that perspective after the loss of his daughter. He had studied the Stoics extensively, but until his daughter died, those philosophies had not sunk in.

Through this work, he encourages the reader to see death as a kindness and accept it unquestioningly as part of life. In a phrase, he suggests that the only two things that are certain are death and that life is uncertain.

Cicero issues a warning about excessive grieving. He compares excessive and long-term grieving to slavery because it practically incapacitates a person. He warns about losing one’s dignity and character during times of grief. He writes that “nothing is more unbecoming and unmanly than exaggerated grief.”

For readers who have or have yet to experience intense grief, this stoic perspective may be too harsh, and in some ways it is. In fact, Cicero writes “since it’s my wound I’m healing, those who pick this book up shouldn’t be surprised if anything strikes them as a little overwrought. That was my plan. I want to help myself and everyone else simultaneously. To the extent I can, I also aim to offer comprehensive consolation for everyone’s grief.”

Cicero lists many Roman and non-Roman men and women who exemplified fortitude during grief. He states the specific tragedy and how that individual responded to the tragedy in the immediate and over time.

As the book continues, the author seems to rein in some of the harshness by striking a balance between grieving and stoicism. He states that it would be “unnatural and inhuman” to feel no grief at all, but follows by stating that to “overindulge in grief” is to reject our “universal condition”―that being death itself.

The Bliss of Death

The ultimate message Cicero seems to send is that death is a favor for all mankind because it eliminates our suffering. The worries and concerns, the pains and heartaches, and (as mentioned from some of his examples) the falls from grace can all be ended with death. He adds that there is often a price to be paid for living too long, a price that he himself was quite familiar with, as he had suffered exile, the death of his daughter, the demise of the Republic, and ultimately (though obviously not mentioned in the book) his murder by Mark Antony.

The author doesn’t suggest that all will have a gleeful time once they have been removed from this life. That heavenly hope is reserved for the righteous and the good. The wicked, however, have hell to look forward to. Cicero discusses the immortal soul as the obvious reason for the heavenly hope. Death is not the end; it is merely the end of suffering.

Regarding heaven, Cicero goes further to discuss the deification of those righteous, even Romulus, the founder of Rome (though this somewhat calls into question his definition of righteous). He lists others who have been deified because of their goodness, and in the end adds his daughter to that saintly list.

An Interesting Perspective on Grief

In the modern world, Stoicism is a lost art, especially in the face of tragedy. There is plenty in this work that readers will disagree with, whether on emotional or spiritual and religious grounds, but it is interesting to see how Cicero dealt with his own grief, and as the translator makes clear, “Consolation” is a work of Cicero’s thinking and belief system.

“How to Grieve” is an interesting read on death, grief, and how one might adjust their view on all of it, or at least how they respond to it.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Good Death Through Time

By Caitlin Mahar, Melbourne University Press, $35.00.

Reviewed by Rama Gaind

How likely is it that our ancestors can help us now to face complex questions of dying?

The Good Death Through Time delves into the history of how people’s responses to dying have changed in western societies. We also get to understand when and why other Australians began to find the notion of a physician-assisted death appealing.

This book also asks how such a death became a ‘thinkable’-even desirable-way to die for so many others in western cultures. In particular, it looks at the radical way in which they changed in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

“I have quite a bit of understanding of white man’s ways, but it is difficult for me to understand this one.” ― G Ntjalka Williams, Ntaria Council President, 1997

An Australian Senate committee investigation of the Northern Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, the first legislation in the world that allowed doctors to actively assist patients to die, found that for the vast majority of Indigenous Territorians, the idea that a physician ― or anyone else ― should help end a dying, suffering person’s life was so foreign that in some instances it proved almost impossible to translate.

For centuries a good death ― the ‘euthanasia’ ― meant a death blessed by God that might well involve pain, for suffering was seen as ultimately redemptive.

This book explores the modern idea that a good death should be painless, bearing in mind sometimes disturbing developments in palliative medicine, and an increasingly well-organised assisted dying movement. We are able to understand the radical historical shift in western attitudes to managing dying and suffering helps us better grasp the stakes in today’s controversies over what it means to die well.

Through unwavering research, Mahar writes an articulate and well-grounded guide to what people have thought and felt about dying.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A Good Death

— Instruction manuals for living written by the dying

By Kristen Martin

Adina Talve-Goodman lived with an awareness of her own mortality that most of us will never approximate. Born with a single-ventricle heart and pulmonary atresia—a condition where the valve that controls blood flow from the heart to the lungs doesn’t form—she had two surgeries in her first week of life alone. By four, she had undergone two open-heart operations; by twelve, she was in heart failure. “I was a happy kid even though I did not know what wellness felt like,” Talve-Goodman explains. After spending nearly two years on the waiting list for a new heart—a process she describes as “an exercise in how close you can get to death”—she received a transplant in 2006, at the age of nineteen. With her new heart, she adjusted to blood that coursed quickly through her body, pinking her previously pallid cheeks, affording her energy and strength she had never before known.

Talve-Goodman dreamed of publishing a collection of essays exploring her experience of chronic illness and approaching the brink of death, informed by critical theories of embodied difference, suffering, and disability. Eleven years after her heart transplant, when she was drafting those essays in the University of Iowa’s nonfiction MFA program, she was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma caused by the immunosuppressants that kept her body from rejecting its new heart. She died six months later, in January 2018, at thirty-one. 

Now, Talve-Goodman’s collection is here, though it is not the book she hoped would be her debut. Your Hearts, Your Scars brings together seven essays, all but one unfinished at the time of her death. In the introduction, her sister Sarika describes the collaborative process behind the book, one that its author did not take part in. “When Adina’s cancer treatments were starting not to go well, she said to me with a sadness and softness that she hadn’t even gotten to publish a book,” Sarika writes. “Of course she would, I said . . . I wish I had responded differently in that moment of openness. Maybe we could have talked about what she had wanted and worked on it together.” Instead, after Talve-Goodman died, her sister read and organized everything she had ever written and compiled a manuscript. Together, Talve-Goodman’s parents, both rabbis; the editorial team she had worked with at One Story for six years (Hannah Tinti, Patrick Ryan, and Maribeth Batcha); and her best friend since childhood, the comedian Jo Firestone, edited her words into “a book made out of love and grief.”

Books like Talve-Goodman’s bring us visions of death, but they do not bring us any closer to understanding it.

The essays that make up Your Hearts, Your Scars come in at just over one hundred pages and are rooted more firmly in the personal than the critical: Talve-Goodman writes about attending a summer camp for teenage transplant recipients in San Diego, before she got her new heart, where she met kids who “carr[ied] the weight of dead donors”; about the Thanksgiving when she held her old heart in her hands, having requested to take it home from the hospital; about realizing that she “might never feel as if being healthy and having energy is normal.” The essays are suffused with compassion and hope, but given the circumstances of publication, the overall effect is achingly bittersweet.

In this juxtaposition of the author’s clear-eyed appreciation for life that comes with being close to death and the reader’s ever-present awareness that the author is now, in fact, dead, Your Hearts, Your Scars joins a lineage of instruction manuals for living written by the dying. The most recent spate of such books hit shelves in the years leading up to the pandemic, before death became all too present and we shunned confronting mortal reality in favor of smarmy calls for resilience. The neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s 2016 memoir When Breath Becomes Air, written in the months leading up to his death of lung cancer at thirty-seven, kicked off a renewed interest in posthumously published meditations on death, hitting the top of the New York Times bestseller list and garnering critical acclaim. The next year brought Cory Taylor’s Dying, which Barack Obama named as one of his favorite books that year, and Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour, which the Washington Post hailed as “this year’s When Breath Becomes Air.” In 2019, Julie Yip-Williams’s The Unwinding of the Miracle, adapted from a blog she kept called My Cancer Fighting Journey, joined the pantheon, a little less than a year following her death at forty-two. It, too, drew comparisons to When Breath Becomes Air (Kalanithi and Yip-Williams shared an editor at Random House).

What unites all these posthumous memoirs is the hunger we bring to them as readers. We expect koan-like wisdom on what matters in life, an enlightened perspective gained from being at or near the end of it. We expect to come away transformed, in possession of the same moral clarity that their authors have achieved by dying. Back cover blurbs demand that readers heed the authors’ lessons: Atul Gawande—the author of Being Mortal, a book about end-of-life medicine—claims that “Dr. Kalanithi’s memoir is proof that the dying are the ones who have the most to teach us about life.” Ann Hood says Cory Taylor’s Dying “should be required reading for all of us.”

The ultimate lesson we hope to learn from these books? How to live meaningfully while knowing that life must end, and when it does end, how to face death with equanimity. Put simply, we want to learn how to die.

I have lived most of my life preoccupied with mortality, wishing that I could understand what it is like to die, to be dead. When I was twelve, my mother died of lung cancer; my father died of prostate cancer two years later. In the decades since, I have stopped believing in an afterlife—my parents are nowhere but in memory. Instead, I have tried to understand their deaths in a way I couldn’t when they were dying, and tried to understand death more broadly, through reading literature published from beyond the grave. Books like Talve-Goodman’s bring us visions of death, but they do not bring us any closer to understanding it.

Instead of this year’s When Breath Becomes Air, perhaps a maudlin blurber might call Your Hearts, Your Scars this year’s The Opposite of Loneliness—so far, this century’s paradigmatic work by an author who died before fully developing her craft. The book’s very existence fetishizes the idea that those who die young are especially insightful and worthy, which is in turn part of an impulse to make trite meaning of a life cut short.

Like Talve-Goodman, Marina Keegan was not consciously composing a manuscript to be read posthumously. She died in a car accident days after her graduation from Yale. The 2014 book— put together by Keegan’s family, friends, and her mentor at Yale, Anne Fadiman—takes its title from a piece Keegan wrote for commencement, which developed a tragic weight after her death because its pep talk no longer applied to her: “What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over . . . The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young.” The Opposite of Loneliness, which hung around the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, drew praise for its “youthful optimism, energy, honesty, and beyond-her-years wisdom.”

Talve-Goodman’s wisdom, on the other hand, comes from having experienced what it was like to die before she died, a fact that colored her image of the future. Though each essay has an undercurrent of brightness, Your Hearts, Your Scars is not a feel-good look at sickness and dying. (This jibes with the fact that the book is out from Bellevue Literary Press, an indie publisher with roots in the historic New York City public hospital that focuses on the intersection of the arts and sciences and exploring the human condition.) What Talve-Goodman’s loved ones have ultimately given readers in publishing her words is a perspective on chronic illness and survival that pushes back on the idea that people who suffer must inspire us or teach us gratitude.

When she died, Talve-Goodman was on the cusp of a literary career; she had only published one piece, an essay titled “I Must Have Been That Man,” which won the 2015 Bellevue Literary Prize in nonfiction. (Coincidentally, Fadiman was the contest’s judge.) That essay, which opens Your Hearts, Your Scars, recounts how Talve-Goodman traversed from illness to wellness forever marked by her near-death, a theme woven throughout the collection. As with many of the other pieces, “I Must Have Been That Man” is built around an incident that happened when Talve-Goodman was in college in St. Louis. She writes of being locked out of her apartment on a rainy day about a year after her heart transplant and coming across a man in the street who had fallen out of his electric wheelchair. It’s a story about the difference between compassion and pity, but the crux is in a reflective moment toward the beginning:

When I listed [for transplant], my parents, both rabbis, told me a story from the Talmud about a rabbi who goes to visit three sick men and each time the rabbi asks, “Is your suffering dear to you?” “That’s the whole story,” they’d explain, “and it’s the question that’s important.” I took it to mean this: When the time comes, will you be able to live without the heart defect that always made you special and strong? Will you be able to face wellness and normalcy?

Talve-Goodman realizes that her suffering is dear to her, at least, she writes, “a little bit.”

Reading the essays that follow, I thought about how the popularity of death memoirs speaks to how the suffering of others is dear to us. In “Your Hearts, Your Scars, Zombies,” a meditation on the cultural figure of the zombie that her sister notes is the closest to the melding of the personal and the critical that she aspired to publish, Talve-Goodman confronts the appetite well people have for stories about sickness: “What, then, for an illness narrative? Perhaps that I am what you make of me—I live this way, a different body, a body of hybridity, to mean something to you, to your experiences, to practice your empathy, to fetishize, even to ‘inspire.’” It’s a refreshing moment of reprimand against a tendency to read illness—or death—narratives with a posture of self-serving pity and a desire to extract encouragement. 

And still, reading Your Hearts, Your Scars, I found myself asking for more than its author wanted to—or could—give. I wished that Talve-Goodman had gone deeper on death—that she had taught me more about how to die. In the collection’s final piece, “Thank God for the Nights That Go Right,” Talve-Goodman lingers on what it felt like to almost die, as opposed to having made it out on the other side, feeling like what she at one point describes as “death in drag.” She writes of being tired, being desperate, being close to giving up the night before she learned that she would receive her transplant. “I always thought dying would feel worse,” Talve-Goodman writes. “I thought there would be more pain, I thought death would be clear.” What did dying feel like? I wrote in the margin, wanting to vicariously understand through reading something that literature cannot deliver.

After reading Your Hearts, Your Scars, I revisited Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air to remind myself of why all these posthumous memoirs get stacked up against it, and why publishers have tried to recreate its success: it actually does meditate cogently and vigorously on what makes life meaningful, even and especially with the acute knowledge of imminent death.

But Kalanithi didn’t start that line of inquiry in his final months—it was a lifelong pursuit, one he began while studying literature and biology in college in an effort to understand both “the life of the mind” and “the rules of the brain.” He chose medicine because he felt it was where “biology, mortality, literature, and philosophy intersect[ed],” and because he believed it would allow him to directly “forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” In performing neurosurgery, working on and in the organ that makes us individuals—the brain—Kalanithi further challenged himself to confront, along with his patients, “what makes life meaningful enough to go on living.” This was a man who dedicated his entire career to grappling with the fundamental questions of life.

There is value in reading death memoirs, if we can take them on their own terms.

Ironically, within When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi makes the argument that literature cannot teach us how to die—something I missed in my first reading, and that the market for books like Kalanithi’s has chosen to ignore. Early on, he writes, “I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge, in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.” Later, after facing death through his patients—which taught him the limits of accessing someone else’s experience—and after receiving his own diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, Kalanithi turns back to books, reading “anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.” He tells his oncologist that he’s doing so, “trying to find the right perspective.” She replies, “I’m not sure that’s something you can find by reading about it.”  

What Kalanithi ultimately learns is that he must decide for himself what he values in life, what makes his own life worth living, where he finds meaning. We each have to do this hard work when the time comes. Even with all of the meditative homework Kalanithi completed ahead of time, it wasn’t until he was dying that he could truly answer these questions, and his answers shifted along with his prognosis, his symptoms, his energy.

But still, there is value in reading death memoirs, if we can take them on their own terms. When Breath Becomes Air cannot prepare us to face our own mortality or bring us closer to comprehending the purpose of life or what it means to die. It can, though, allow us inside one man’s personal and philosophical end-of-life reckoning, which may in turn spur our own reflections. Similarly,Your Hearts, Your Scars cannot be an instruction manual for “living each day as a gift,” as the back cover claims that Talve-Goodman did. It can be a slim volume of words about coming-of-age that a young writer never got to polish to her satisfaction, shared as part of her legacy.

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Rob Delaney’s book, about the loss of his son, sings with life

In ‘A Heart That Works,’ the ‘Catastrophe’ star ruminates on the death of his toddler from a brain tumor

by Nora McInerny

At the very top of the list of things that people say are “unimaginable” is the tragedy of one’s child dying. People don’t mean they can’t imagine it, of course, but that they will not; it would be too sad, too much. Not 10 pages into Rob Delaney’s “A Heart That Works,” a memoir of his son Henry’s life and death from brain cancer at age 2½, he insists that you do imagine it.

“If you have more than one child, it’s critical you pick one for this exercise,” he writes. “If you’re reading this, and you have a child, do it now.”

I did exactly that, because I’m a good listener, and because Delaney’s urge to have the world around him gain fluency in his pain is familiar to any griever. How can we express what it means to lose the ones we love, what their lives meant to the people in their orbit? How can we get people not just to acknowledge our pain with platitudes and sympathy cards and flower arrangements, but to feel it?

When everything happens for a reason, even the bitterest pill can be swallowed. But what meaning can possibly be assigned to a cancerous tumor growing in your baby’s brain? To watching him suffer through treatments that can only delay the inevitable? To having a permanent hole torn in the fabric of your family when there is nothing more to be done, and your toddler dies on his father’s 41st birthday?

For Delaney — blessedly — there is none. There is no silver lining to his infant son being diagnosed with a brain tumor and undergoing two years of brutal treatment, no bright side to his other sons growing up without their brother, to holding, with his wife, their son’s lifeless body. If that sounds like a bummer, well, it is — the guy’s kid died! — but to those who have felt the icy grip of grief around their own throats, it is a relief to read an account of grief that is not a series of hard-won life lessons wrapped in a gratitude journal.

There is no making sense of the senseless, and Delaney doesn’t attempt to. Instead, the comedian — best-known to my children as the dad from last year’s “Home Alone” reboot, and to most adults as the creator and co-star of “Catastrophe” — ditches a linear narrative and drags us into the chaos of real grief.

The book starts after Henry’s death and skips around in scenes that explore life before Henry’s illness, during his treatment and after his death. The result is a book that sings with life: not just Henry’s abbreviated one but the lives of the people who loved him, who love him, who will continue to love him until, as Delaney writes, they “walk through a door he had walked through.”

It’s unfair to expect grievers to emerge from the depths of loss having mined diamonds of meaning, alchemizing their suffering into a form of self-improvement. Grief, Delaney notes, doesn’t sanctify you, but in his case it appears to sharpen his vision: He spills out his shame over the workaholism that made him “a bad husband and a very, very good cog in the TV machine.”

He admits to skipping his father’s birthday celebration because, you know, doesn’t it seem a little gauche to celebrate having 70 years on this planet when your grandson had only two? These are the kinds of thoughts a person in the throes of grief often has and rarely gets to say out loud, let alone commit to the page.

After wiping tears from my face over the reaction one of Henry’s caregivers had to the news that the boy would soon die, I howled in delight at Delaney’s response to an acquaintance who wanted the Delaneys to know that his grandfather had survived the kind of brain tumor that killed Henry:

“Are you … kidding me? I wouldn’t care if your ninety-year-old grandfather got hit by three buses and then fell into a meat grinder! Grandfathers are supposed to get tumors and die! That’s their job!”

That my laughter annoyed the child whose death I had dutifully imagined earlier in the day was a bonus; I’d thought similar things when his father died of a brain tumor in 2014. That a book about a dead child is at times laugh-out-loud funny is a testament to Delaney’s skill; in the hands of a lesser writer, the humor could seem dismissive or grasping instead of the natural release valve of a person who is highly attuned to the absurdity of the awful.

Mary Oliver assured us that we do not have to be good, but Delaney shows us what that means: In the midst of your disorienting pain you can rage against the absurd and inhuman bureaucracy of modern health care; find comfort in passive suicidal ideation during scuba training (“I won’t take the regulator out of my mouth and inhale a lungful of water on purpose, but if it got knocked out by another flailing student and my own fin got caught on a drain, and I panicked and inhaled, and they couldn’t revive me — well, then that would be okay”); find comfort in your partner’s body while your child is undergoing brain surgery across the street; hate that your child is suffering and still find great beauty in the tasks associated with his care.

Grief is far more than crying, and a person is far more than their death. To share any part of Henry with the world was an act of great generosity. The depth of my own medical knowledge comes from the University of Google, but I can assure Rob Delaney that his is a heart that works.

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Death as Life’s Work

In her new book, Hayley Campbell seeks to demystify death by sharing the perspectives of funeral home directors, gravediggers and others

By Robert DiGiacomo

What happens when people die is often glossed over. Yet as the adage goes, death is one of life’s few certainties.

Journalist Hayley Campbell in her new book, “All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work,” sets out to demystify death by writing about “the naked, banal reality of this thing that will come to us all.”

It’s a subject for which Campbell, 36, has been preparing for most of her life. As a little girl, she recalls death being ever present — she drew dead bodies after seeing her comic book artist father’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper in progress, questioned the version of death from her Catholic school education and saw her first body at 12, when her friend, Harriet, drowned while trying to rescue her dog. The London-based Campbell has since written regularly about death and related topics for Wired, BuzzFeed, Vice and other publications.

“On an existential level, we have to think about death; not only will we die, but everyone we know and love will die.”

In “All the Living and the Dead,” Campbell spends time with those whose professional lives revolve around death, including funeral directors, gravediggers and an executioner. Warning to anyone who’s squeamish: She provides vivid details of what it’s like to dress the dead, perform an autopsy and process bodies for use in medical education.

“On an existential level, we have to think about death; not only will we die but everyone we know and love will die,” Campbell told Next Avenue. “I can see why people would avoid that topic, but once you start talking about death with people for whom it’s their job, you can see how you can compartmentalize it.”

Here are some key takeways about death — and life — from Campbell and the book:

Death is Never Far Away, Whether We Acknowledge It or Not

As part of her research, Campbell went places where few civilians dare. “We don’t want to think about it, so it’s sort of a secret,” Campbell says of many death rituals. “I love seeing the stuff that as a general civilian person you can’t see. It can be behind doors you pass every day — on every high street, there is a funeral home — but you don’t realize something interesting is happening there every day.”

Even when we must go to a funeral home, whether to plan a service for a loved one or attend a memorial, the experience is usually a fleeting encounter. For those in the funeral industry, it’s their way of being.

“It was a huge privilege to talk to those people,” Campbell says. “The thing they kept telling me was they do this job every day. When families have to use them, the family will be hugely involved and their best friends for two weeks. After the funeral, they will disappear and go back to not thinking that embalmers exist. I wanted to get through the appreciation of the work that has to happen. The world would look completely different if we didn’t have people collecting the bodies.”

There’s a Difference Between Being Desensitized and Detached About Death

As we enter middle age, death becomes ever more prominent, as we face the loss of parents, siblings, close friends, a spouse or partner — and our own mortality. Yet few of us are prepared for major loss. But when death is your reality, you have to develop a way to compartmentalize.

“People think death workers must be desensitized, but there’s a difference between people being desensitized and detached in a way that’s helpful,” Campbell says. “They’re not not thinking about death — they have thought about it a lot and stepped back just enough to do their jobs. They have thought about it so much that they have made peace with it. But I don’t think we as a society have been able to deal with it. So when someone dies, we completely fall apart.”

A New Generation is Rethinking the Funeral Ritual

As a younger generation — including more women — enter the funeral industry, rituals and attitudes are changing. This might mean a more personalized funeral service, a natural burial without a body being embalmed or even loved ones participating in a traditional ritual like dressing the dead, as Campbell did as part of her research.

“The role of the funeral director has changed to more of a counselor role rather than someone who just organizes the hearse,” Campbell says. “I do think women are changing it. Female funeral directors are more into letting families do things the way they want. But if they want tradition, they will organize it with the horse and the cart. I think they are just more open — the thing that is common among all the women in the funeral industry is they want to give people a voice and not force a certain way of doing anything on anyone.”

“The role of the funeral director has changed to more of a counselor role rather than someone who just organizes the hearse.”

Details Matter When Handling the End of Someone’s Life

Whether it’s the funeral director who kept underwear and socks in different sizes because families often forgot to bring undergarments for their loved one and he couldn’t live with someone not being properly dressed in their casket — or a gravedigger who provided a certain type of soil for the minster to throw on a coffin that would land more softly, those dealing with death regularly understand the difference the smallest details can make.

“They all had a sense of compassion and a sense of empathy,” Campbell says. “They all were doing little things in their job that no one would notice but they felt was the right thing to do. It may seem like something small, but when you think about grieving people and how they are so sensitive to everything, they are massive.”

Death Has a Way of Grounding You

Having written about death for most of her career, Campbell is not someone who’s faint of heart. But having immersed herself in death for three years to write the book, she came away with a new appreciation for life.

“It’s not like my eyes have been opened to things that I didn’t know about but the details have been filled in,” Campbell says. “I’ve seen dead babies and old, old dead people. I’m far more conscious of the old cliché that life is short. That is true, but you have no idea how much time you’re going to get. I think I’m more conscious of time.”

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